Rhizomatic Telling –Recognising the Mechanism of Small Stories in a Community Organisation Process

Abstract

As an unforeseen pandemic disturbs our livelihoods and forces us to change our boundaries, small talks arise and disperse in fleeting moments within and beyond physical perimeters. The notion of singular truth (metanarrative : Lyotard 1984) has evidently been overridden in this time. Small stories (Bamberg 2004, 2006; Georgakopoulou 2006; 2007) are heavily embedded as part of the trajectory of social interactions. As fragments of talk-in-interactions, they are recontextualised and reaffirmed as narratives along multiple threads of conversations across time. Presented in this article is a microstudy implementing the lens of small stories on communication activities taking place among members of a specific location-based community. This is a part of the ongoing PhD research on bottom-up community organisation through the alignment of community-specific narratives and positioning of socially engaged art practitioners. The microstudy on communal conversations on an instant messaging app looks into how multiple realities are reconfigured by virtue of multiple tellers and modes of telling.

Keywords

• small stories
• telling
• narrative mechanism
• multiplicity
• community organisation